Behind the Laptop Week 14
Resulting and the value of different goals
Wednesday 11/27
As the season wraps up for all but a handful of college teams, it seems like a fitting time to talk briefly about results, resulting, and goals.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term resulting, it’s been brought to prominence by poker players and decision theorists like Annie Duke. It’s when you measure the quality of your decisions based on the outcomes of those decisions. As I reflect on a below-.500 season, it’s easy to tell myself a story that the decisions made over the course of the season must not have been very good because they led to a losing record. That’s resulting.
Here’s a recent example from the online forum, VolleyTalk. It was in reference to the then-recent Nebraska loss to Penn State. The poster was wondering why John Cook didn’t remove Lindsay Krause from the match when she had three kills and five attack errors at the end of the match. Cook didn’t know, in the moment that Krause, hitting .230 on the season, would hit negative in that match. But that’s how resulting works, you assume that Krause’s poor efficiency was a foregone conclusion when you look back at it afterwards.
In the valley of the normal, events unfold [in ways that] appear normal in hindsight, although they were not expected, and although we could not have predicted them.
Daniel Kahneman, et al.
from “Noise”
But resulting also happens on much smaller scales, like individual points and individual actions. As an analyst, my primary job is to describe results. But the results I describe were anything but certain. They were only probabilities until the actual event. In the instant in which probability becomes certainty, you quickly fill in a story that explains the outcome you just saw.
It’s really hard to notice it when you fill in a story to match the outcome. Really hard. Fortunately, it’s much easier to just short circuit that process before it gets going. Don’t worry right away about how or why it happened. Ask other questions first. How likely was the event I just saw happen? Should I be surprised that it happened? If you want to ask those questions, an analyst is really helpful. I’m here to remind you of the probabilities that existed before the event and help you set your expectations for if you should be surprised or not by the events you see.
Even though the primary job may be to describe results, there’s no reason why an analyst can’t be used to track progress as well as outcomes. In the long run, I track progress by comparing previous outcomes to present ones to see if any trends appear. One way I can do that is by showing each match as a unit of analysis.
Another way I can do this is with a moving average, counting the last x number of contacts to calculate an average.
Notice the amount of variance in both of these plots. That variance, even when looking at groups of contacts, should be a reminder of the variance inherent in individual contacts and points. For most skills, we shouldn’t be surprised when players don’t get the outcome they/you wanted.
That’s why progress and process goals matter. Players can do everything how they wanted and still not get the desired outcome. The opponent gets a turn. Chance gets a turn. Those things are out of your control, no matter how much you imagine you have control over them. If you only consider performance in terms of outcomes, the plots above show that you’re always going to be on a roller coaster. If you and the players focus on process and progress, then you can put the ups and downs in better perspective.
If you prepare yourself and the players to expect variance in outcomes, then you can keep your minds on the things that, over time, can create better outcomes more often. Progress and process goals not only give perspective, they can also give direction and inspiration.
I’ll be presenting at the AVCA convention next month and I hope you can attend both the convention as a whole and my sessions in particular. I now have two sessions! The first is called “Music and Magic: Ideas for Coaching, Planning, Managing, and Creating” and is scheduled for Saturday, 12/21 at 9:00am. The second session, scheduled for Saturday, 12/21 at 11:30am, is called “Risk _____ to Win _____: Identifying and Managing Competitive Opportunities”.
